2014-03-02

Debugging QNX applications using Qt Creator

According to Wikipedia QNX is: "QNX is a commercial Unix-like real-time operating system, aimed primarily at the embedded systems market".

One could get an evaluation copy of QNX 6.5.0SP1 and have a virtual machine running the x86 version of QNX 6.5.0SP1. QNX comes with an Eclipse based IDE, which is nice and all but I'm interested in QtCreator :)

Fortunately QNX has an updated version of GDB "gdb-7.5-r791". Upgrading gdb was just a matter of unpacking gdb-prereq-linux.tgz and linux-gdb-7.5-r791.tar.gz. Now GDB version is "GNU gdb (GDB) 7.5 qnx (rev. 791)" which is copyrighted "(C) 2012 Free Software Foundation, Inc.".

Unfortunately Qt Creator 3.0.1 was not able to use the debugger. In Qt Creator's "Debugger Log" I was able to find out why:

Python from the "gdb-prereq-linux.tgz" file, which ended up being installed here /opt/qnx650/host/linux/x86/usr/python27/, was incomplete. Binascii module should have been available, but was not.

So I decided to compile my own version of "Python 2.7.2". This was a bit tricky because Qt Creator needs a 32bit version of Python and my Linux installation was 64bit. I've set up a schroot environment for a 32bit version of my Linux distribution and done a ./configure, make, make install build of Python 2.7.2.